Film Categories: art & artists

  • It’s Not Me, It’s An Image Of Me

    To make an object based on a photograph means adding dimensions such as space, time and continuity. Roasting skewers, hairpins and nails were the tools of self-liberation in the photo series Zerstörung einer Illusion (‘Destruction of an Illusion’) by Karin Mack, which was produced in 1977 with a self-timer and her hand processing work in the darkroom. Forty years after its creation, it is a new perspective that transforms and sets into motion the examination of the self-image and role as a woman into a three-dimensional object. Light and rotation create an illusory horizon of perception inherent in filmmaking and…

  • Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane?

    Toronto, 1963. Jackie Shane – a black, queer, soul-singing, flamboyant Nashville-born, Toronto-based musician – had a hit song on the charts. The song was a sensation, and with the lyrics “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that’s I’m gay; tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way”, it was also an underground gay anthem. But before being able to fully enjoy the fruits of this success, Jackie suddenly disappeared. Uncovering this forgotten piece of Toronto queer music history, artists Hortie and Reynolds recreate Jackie’s story using original shadow puppets, overhead animation and stop motion techniques. Follow Jackie through…

  • Exhumation

    Peeling back the shrouded image, “Exhumation” is a reanimation of long-lost desire. A response to news of a celebrity paternity suit and the mythology adhered to it, “Exhumation” obsesses over buried memories to create one’s own monster from memory. Re-composed of images chemically treated to disintegrate, the figures peel their identities away to remain as ghosts of what once was. At once a diary of a death mask and of speculative hope, “Exhumation” dives through years of hurt feelings to find that although the body was here, you vanished.

  • In a Foreign Country

    A cinematographic transcreation of a text censored in 1968.

  • Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman

    Edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom Philip Hoffman has been making personal documentary films for over twenty years. He has devoted his life to examining the narrow aperture each of us uses to bring our own experience into focus. As many of the writers in this volume will attest, telling personal stories is dangerous work. “Landscape with Shipwreck” is an untidy stew of gravediggers and critics, architects and builders. In their conversion of pictures into words, each has used the history of their own naming as compass and guide. These photographs and scripts speak alongside the written word, not…

  • In the Embryo of All Things: The Poems of Harry Alan Potamkin

    Between 1920 and his death in 1933, Harry Alan Potamkin wrote poems for literary magazines, workers’ newspapers and Black newspapers. He was first inspired by the example of modernist poets, and as America changed in the days of the Great Depression, so too did Potamkin’s poems, striking an uneasy balance between social vision and aesthetic experimentation. Potamkin’s poems fused elegy, outrage and reportage with the concerns of the ancients. “In the Embryo of All Things” is the first collection of Harry Alan Potamkin’s poems. This volume gathers his complete poems, including a speculative arrangement of his unfinished Spectacle Negre and…

  • One last night without sadness

    Fleeing the temptations of the city, two young marginals squat a cabin in the heart of the forest. Torn between their desire to live and their impulse to die, they live a love story out of time.

  • REBIRTH

    “A dance ritual which turns into recreation of the self.” Transformation is a dance ritual. With every move you are born again. With every little step, you cut the umbilical cord. With every turn, you create a new shell.

  • Royal Jelly

    The film begins in abstraction, then we are greeted by a drag queen that we follow down the rabbit hole to meet the menagerie of people that have become her community.

  • My Fuzzy Valentine

    Put the Playboy centrefold in the hands of a Dyke and she will make her into a monster. A pulsating world of bug-eyed lesbian sasquatches and vaginal caves created from reclaimed textiles. Visual artist Allyson Mitchell’s shape-shifting materials and colors explode off the screen on hand-processed and scratched 16mm film.